Can this budget turn our orange economy from culture into commerce?
For the first time in the country’s history, a national budget names the creative economy as an economic sector in its own right and puts Tk800 crore behind it. The question now is whether recognition can mature into strategy
For a country that has long measured economic success through garments, remittances and agriculture, this year's budget contains a striking signal that Bangladesh may be preparing for a different future.
The government has unveiled a series of initiatives aimed at transforming creativity, sports and digital entrepreneurship into engines of growth. The budget allocates Tk800 crore to the creative economy.
There is also an allocation of Tk200 crore for the Notun Kuri Sports programme, which has already attracted more than 168,000 young athletes nationwide, while proposing Sports Villages in all 64 districts to build a sports economy around events, media, tourism and services.
At the same time, start-ups, freelancers and content creators have received a major boost through long-term VAT exemptions that could significantly lower the cost of innovation and business formation.
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These steps show that the government is beginning to view creativity not merely as culture or entertainment, but as a strategic economic asset capable of generating jobs, exports and investment in an increasingly knowledge-driven global economy.
A sector that grew without the state
The recognition has been long overdue. The Economic Census 2024 by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics found that employment in the arts, entertainment and recreation sector reached 112,829 in 2024. This represented a 237% increase from just 33,441 in 2013.
Output tells the same story. The sector contributed Tk9,193 crore to GDP in FY25, growing by 15.4% year-on-year against nominal GDP growth of 10.2%, and outpacing agriculture (12.8%), industry (10%) and services (11.8%).
For 15 consecutive years, the three ministries closest to the sector — Cultural Affairs, Information and Broadcasting, and Youth and Sports — received less than 1% of the development budget: 0.61% in FY12 and 0.81% in FY26. Twenty basis points of movement while the creative workforce tripled. Digital platforms, a freelance ecosystem and market demand did the work the state did not.
Yet, at just 0.17% of a Tk55 lakh crore economy, the sector's weight remains marginal. The gap between its momentum and its size is precisely what policy exists to close — and precisely what every successful creative economy has closed deliberately.
What the world has already worked out
The term "orange economy" was coined by Felipe Buitrago and Iván Duque in 2013. It encompasses industries in which human creativity, intellectual capital and cultural heritage are the primary raw materials for generating goods, services and economic value. It is no longer a boutique idea.
UN Trade and Development's Creative Economy Outlook 2024 found the sector contributing between 0.5% and 7.3% of GDP across countries and accounting for up to 12.5% of total employment.
South Korea remains the canonical case. After the 1997 financial crisis, Seoul embedded culture within industrial policy through the Cultural Industry Promotion Act in 1999, a dedicated content agency and public content funds. Today, K-content exports have reached a record $14.9 billion, and the culture ministry is targeting a 400 trillion won (around $265 billion) K-culture market by 2030, with record inbound tourism riding the wave.
China's National Bureau of Statistics valued culture and related industries at 6.2 trillion yuan, or roughly $880 billion, equivalent to about 4.61% of GDP in 2024. That single sector is larger than Bangladesh's entire economy.
Indonesia is the more instructive peer. Its creative economy contributed 7.28% of GDP in 2024, employs 27.4 million people — nearly a fifth of the national workforce — and exported $26.68 billion in the first 10 months of 2025. President Prabowo Subianto elevated it to a standalone ministry within weeks of taking office.
India, meanwhile, announced in its February 2026 Union Budget the establishment of AVGC Content Creator Labs across 15,000 secondary schools and 500 colleges, with the Indian Institute of Creative Technologies in Mumbai serving as the nodal agency. The announcement followed four years of groundwork by a task force constituted in April 2022.
What the budget gets right
The budget is relatively systematic in outlining a plan. A feasibility study is to be fast-tracked for a 160-acre, world-class Central Creative Hub in Dhaka's Purbachal under a public-private partnership model, alongside a 10-year investment plan to extend creative hubs to divisional, district and upazila levels through the Shilpakala and Shishu academies. Universities are also set to receive innovation hubs.
Creative products such as handloom textiles, shital pati, shataranji, terracotta and wooden toys are being incorporated into the One Village, One Product initiative, backed by a National Pool of Designers and a modernisation drive for BSCIC's design wing.
Heritage buildings will be restored under pilot projects linked to international festivals, the film industry will receive internationally certified studios for the OTT era, and a "Created in Bangladesh" national brand is expected to promote the sector abroad.
Sports, tellingly, is being recast not as recreation but as a full economic sector spanning events, media, merchandise and tourism.
The budget also contains one of the strongest signals yet that the government intends to treat the digital and creative economy as a legitimate economic sector rather than a peripheral activity. In a major relief for content creators, freelancers and start-up entrepreneurs, the proposed FY27 budget offers a series of tax and VAT exemptions aimed at lowering the cost of innovation and digital entrepreneurship.
The finance minister has proposed withdrawing the existing 15% VAT on locally operating start-ups, while also exempting imported services and office or commercial space rentals used by start-up firms from the same tax burden. Significantly, these exemptions will remain in force until June 2035, providing a rare degree of long-term policy certainty for investors and entrepreneurs.
By reducing operating costs and extending policy support over nearly a decade, the government is effectively lowering barriers to entry for thousands of young entrepreneurs, freelancers and digital creators. This is particularly important in Bangladesh, where access to capital remains limited and many start-ups fail during their early years because of high compliance and operational costs.
The VAT exemptions could encourage more businesses to formalise, attract greater private investment into technology and creative ventures, and improve Bangladesh's competitiveness in the regional digital economy. More broadly, the measures acknowledge a fundamental shift in the nature of economic growth.
The budget is relatively systematic in outlining a plan. A feasibility study is to be fast-tracked for a 160-acre, world-class Central Creative Hub in Dhaka's Purbachal under a public-private partnership model, alongside a 10-year investment plan to extend creative hubs to divisional, district and upazila levels through the Shilpakala and Shishu academies. Universities are also set to receive innovation hubs.
As artificial intelligence, digital platforms and remote work reshape global labour markets, future employment opportunities are increasingly emerging in knowledge-intensive and creativity-driven sectors. If complemented by improvements in skills development, intellectual property protection and access to finance, these incentives could help nurture an ecosystem in which Bangladeshi creators, software developers, designers and content producers can compete not only in the domestic market but also internationally.
More importantly, the budget reflects a broader shift in policy thinking — recognising that future economic growth may come as much from ideas, digital products and intellectual property as from traditional industries.
Where the plan is thin
Yet enthusiasm should be tempered by arithmetic. At current GDP levels, a target of 1.5% implies a sector worth roughly Tk82,500 crore — nearly nine times today's output, with the goalpost receding as the economy grows. Against that destination, Tk800 crore is seed money: less than one-tenth of 1% of the national budget.
The deeper gap is structural. The industry remains profoundly informal — with no pensions, little professional protection, and perhaps only 5% of musicians able to treat their craft as a full-time profession. The rest are pushed into second jobs or out of the field altogether. Intellectual property is the core asset class of this economy, yet Bangladesh's IP enforcement remains notoriously weak.
Nor is there, as yet, a task force or a published national strategy. India's school labs arrived after four years of task-force preparation. The "master plan" referenced by the finance minister must become a public, costed and time-bound document. Otherwise, the list of hubs risks meeting the familiar fate of ADP projects parked under ministries that have been underfunded for decades and are not renowned for execution.
For the first time in its history, Bangladesh's orange economy has a dedicated place in the national budget. Judged as an initial response to the sector's potential, this budget is directionally correct, fiscally cautious and institutionally incomplete.
Whether it evolves into a genuine growth industry will depend on implementation and the effective execution of these new ideas.
Shadique Mahbub Islam is a journalist.
